


Oblivion

by tehtarik



Series: SpiritAssassin Week 2017 [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Lesbians in Space, Space Wives, SpiritAssassin Week, SpiritAssassin Week 2017, baze x chirrut, fuck yeah space wives, lesbian spiritassassin, spiritassassin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 07:59:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10760058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik
Summary: Half the street levelled by a series of grenades to incinerate the insurgents, never mind the civilians, never mind Baze’s family that she abandoned anyway, all those years ago when she left to join the Guardians.The city is burning.





	Oblivion

**Author's Note:**

> **For SpiritAssassin Week 2017 on tumblr.  
>  Prompt is: _hurt/comfort_**

Baze doesn’t remember exactly what happened on the day of Zhongqiujie. The festival is a fractured mirror in her head, shards of consciousness coming together at all the wrong angles and it’s messy, there’s fire, houses in flames, houses in great blooming sunflowers of fire.

Like the flowers in the greenhouse that her family used to grow. The greenhouse is gone.

Half the street levelled by a series of grenades to incinerate the insurgents, never mind the civilians, never mind Baze’s family that she abandoned anyway, all those years ago when she left to join the Guardians.

Stupid stupid girl, her auntie would say. Too late. Far too late.

Her mothers would be kinder, softer, have more indulgent words for Baze - if they weren’t already dead. No sign of either of them.

Baze runs through the shelled street, eviscerated buildings with their crumbled innards spilling around them. She scrapes through debris laden with body parts, limbs both flesh and cybernetic, pulling off slabs of shrapnel-embedded rock until her hands are red with blood and her eyes raw with sand.

Good. The blood and the sand are cleansing.

She passes snapped strings of lanterns on the ground, most of them shredded. The sanctification prayers written on their insides mean nothing. Lanterns everywhere, remnants of them, fluttering dirt red and dirt yellow on the ground, on the rubble piles, like ripped flags.

That’s how she knows it’s Zhongqiujie today.

 

***

 

Baze storms into a tea house where there’s a trio of off-duty Imperials drinking what they call desert piss-tea and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. The rage that impels her is a live, vicious force and it snaps her hands and feet into savage motion, wrings curses out of her tongue as she upends the Imperials’ table. They draw their blasters but she’s quicker than that. She dodges and kicks, disarms one of them and seizes his blaster, blows a smouldering crater into another. As for the last Imperial, once she slams his face into the wall, she takes his head in the lethal cradle of her hands and snaps his neck. She is strong enough for that.

She looks at the carnage around her and does not understand. Somehow, vaguely, the thought occurs to her that she’ll understand less and less each passing day.

 

***

 

The patrol finally comes for her. Six troopers surround her as she crouches behind a low wall, as blaster fire decimates that remaining barrier.

She bites her knuckles until her teeth puncture skin, spits on both her palms, takes handfuls of sand and rubs the spit-moistened granules on her filthy scalp. She doesn’t pray. She’s forgotten all the chants of strength, all the inward journeys of peace, the supplications for specific times of need. She forgets the Temple and the Guardians and the family that she abandoned and the gutted city around her.

All she’s aware of is that she’s a body strung into being and movement and mad purpose by the live wires of her veins, by the toxic fuel of her blood.

That’s all Baze has been for weeks, prowling the wrecked areas of the city alone.

She leaps out from behind the wall, rolls on the ground, firing the last of her ammo at the troopers. Two go down. Then she gets shot in the leg and fire sears her hip and she can’t get up and she knows she’s done for.

Except.

Except there is a sudden swish and a whirl of movement as somebody lands before her, shielding her from the remaining troopers. Black and red. A staff. A voice whose familiarity pulls her out of the sunken chambers of her mind.

There is a brief scuffle. It doesn’t last long.

The person kneels before her, and Baze knows that face, the downturned mouth and the creases knifed into her forehead. The span of her hands on Baze’s cheek. The slow thumb moving along the route of Baze’s cheekbone. The eyes that do not see.

“I’ve found you at last,” says Chirrut.

 

***

 

Chirrut carries her home. Home to the attic room on the roof of a squat block of apartments where they had both been staying at before Baze ran off.

Chirrut peels off Baze’s clothes, disinfects and bandages her wounds. Then she cleans Baze, cleans all the filth out of her skin, washes her scalp and her growing, unkempt hair, combs it, twists it into braids. Chirrut boils rice water for Baze and feeds her, spoonful by spoonful.

Baze opens her mouth and fumbles for words. It’s like waking out of a dark, overwhelming slumber.

“Don’t speak,” says Chirrut. “And I won’t either. There’s no need to say anything. I’ve found you, and that’s all that matters.”

There is no banter between them, none of the usual laughter. It’s okay, though, Baze is thankful.

 

***

 

They don’t leave their attic lodgings for awhile. For many days, they lie on their shared mattress, listening to broadcasts on pirate frequencies, using a holopad salvaged from the Temple. Chirrut gets up to recite her prayers, to meditate, to change Baze’s bandages. Her daily routines in their limited space quietly, carefully orbit Baze.‘s needs

Baze sits up one day. Her body aches dully, but the pain makes her want to laugh.

“Chirrut,” she says.

“Yes, my love?”

“My family are gone.”

“I know.” Chirrut’s large pale eyes are sad. “I went looking for you as soon as I heard.”

“How long was I gone for?”

“Three weeks.”

“When I was out there in the city, I lost all sense of time. And any measure of control. I forgot everything. Everyone.” Guilt slithers its way through her thoughts. “You were worried.”

“I _was._ But it is of no consequence now. As I told you, all that matters is that I’ve brought you home.”

Baze closes her eyes, basking in the gentle confidence of Chirrut’s words. Chirrut kisses her eyelids, both of them.

She reaches for Baze’s hand and kisses Baze’s fingertips, one by one, and then presses her lips to Baze’s knuckles. “I’m here for you. As I promised to be, when I took you to be my wife all those years ago.”

The edges of her mouth diffuse into a smile. She rises to her feet but Baze doesn’t let go of Chirrut’s wrist.

“I’ve got to boil the porridge, if we plan to have a meal sometime today.”

“The porridge can wait,” says Baze. She traces circles on the insides of Chirrut’s wrist. “Stay in bed with me for awhile.”

And Chirrut does. 

Outside, the city carries on. They won’t see much of it for the next few days.


End file.
